Richard Keller's "Action Psychologique: French Psychiatry in Colonial North Africa, 1900-1962" places North Africa and the figure of the mentally-ill Muslim at the center of the intellectual and professional development of French psychiatry in the twentieth century. Skillfully integrating the historical literature on European colonialism with an analysis of the power/knowledge constellation in psychiatric practice, Keller shows that French psychiatrists absorbed the orientalist assumptions of France's "civilizing mission" and viewed North Africa as an open space for building psychiatric institutions and testing psychological theories and treatments. Indeed, the colonial world provided a kind of outlet for French psychiatry as the profession saw its former dominance in Europe challenged by its German counterpart. Concerned with practices as well as institutions, the dissertation is attentive to the voices of the colonized and shows the deep interconnections between resistance to colonialism and opposition to the racialist psychiatry that inhered in the French colonial project. Keller examines psychological warfare during the Algerian War (action psychologique) and the background of the revolutionary theorist Franz Fanon, then a psychiatrist working in that environment of colonial ethnopsychiatry. Thus Keller brings his local subject well into the mainstream of modern history and illuminates origins of anti-colonial and anti-psychiatric movements. The dissertation lies in a crucial, but understudied area in the history of the human sciences. It is based on an impressive amount of primary research in French and Tunisian archives, and it contributes greatly to the history of psychiatry and psychology and to the study of European colonialism.
--by 2002 FHHS Dissertation Prize Committee: Peder Anker, Paul Lerner, and David K. Robinson.